Torture At Guantanamo Alleged

Captive Claims He Was Forced To End Hunger Strike.

March 1, 2006|By Josh White The Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Lawyers for a captive at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, contend that their client was tortured to coerce him into abandoning a lengthy hunger strike, claiming that tactics used to force-feed detainees explicitly violate a new federal law that bars cruel or degrading treatment of people in U.S. custody.

In a 13-page filing released Tuesday, the lawyers claim that U.S. military officials at Guantanamo Bay used harsh and unnecessary tactics to break a hunger strike that at one point included more than 100 detainees. Invoking a new law principally written by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the lawyers argue that the military illegally made the force-feeding process painful and humiliating in order to coerce cooperation from the detainees.

The new procedures were instituted in early January. They include strapping detainees to a restraint chair, forcing a tube down their throats, feeding them large quantities of liquid nutrients and water, and leaving them in the chair for as long as two hours to keep them from purging the food, according to detainee accounts of the procedures and military officials. Detainees told their lawyers that the tactics, first reported last month in The New York Times, caused them to urinate and defecate on themselves and that the insertion and removal of the feeding tube was painful.

Mohammad Bawazir, a Yemeni detainee who was the subject of Friday's filing in U.S. District Court in Washington, told his lawyers he began his hunger strike in August and was bent on dying in Cuba, but stopped resisting the force-feeding last year when he decided it was futile. Bawazir's lawyers said he had been allowing the feedings -- through a tube that was left in his body at all times -- but the tactics changed dramatically on January 11, when the military strapped Bawazir to a chair and forced a much larger tube into his nose and down his throat, causing him "unbearable pain."